Indoor agricultural and horticultural operations where plants are grown under artificial lighting are increasingly commonplace. Some advantages of indoor plant growth operations include allowing for extended growing cycles, increased yield per unit area (e.g., vertical framing), fine tuning of environmental variables including light output to enhance plant yield, security and enhance ability to monitor the operation. Various types of grow lights are available including incandescent, fluorescent, compact fluorescent, metal halide, high pressure sodium, and light emitting diodes (LEDS) based lighting. Each type presents unique characteristics, such as, cost to purchase, cost to operate, efficiency, light spectrum and radiant power output, etc. Key features of plant grow lights include providing the appropriate amount of photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) to ensure and optimize plant growth. Providing the appropriate radiant spectrum and power while minimizing energy consumption is another important goal of indoor growing operations and a benchmark metric of plant growth fixtures.
Light emitting diodes (LED) technology is rapidly being applied to the agricultural and horticultural fields to allow for high efficiency indoor plant cultivation and growth. The increased energy efficiency of LED technology compared with other lighting solutions coupled with the reduction of costs of LED themselves are increasing the number of LED applications and rates of adoptions across industries. Examples of such industries and markets include plant growing applications spanning the breadth from small indoor home greenhouses and nurseries to full scale indoor farming facilities. LEDs and associated technologies are becoming increasingly electrically efficient and are supplanting other lighting technologies because of this efficiency and associated cost savings. LED technology also promises greater reliability overall lifetimes than other lighting technologies. Importantly, LED technology and solid state lighting (SSL) in general provides a platform to customize specific light output spectra to meet the demands of any specific application thereby increasing efficiency and optimizing the light output to meet the desired application. This feature of tailoring and tuning output spectra of LED fixtures can be used in the grow lighting and other arenas to provide the specific wavelengths and wavelength ranges tailored and optimized to the specific application. For example, LED lights with specific wavelengths in the far red and ultraviolet bands are of interest to some growers for use during certain stages of plant growth to elicit a variety of positive plant growth and quality responses. Generally, optimization of photo-synthetically active regions of the light spectrum depending on the plant species and/or growth cycle can both reduce energy consumption and enhance plant growth and yield.
In many cases indoor plant grow operations may allow for a greater control over the ambient environment and radiant flux than an outdoor grow operation. For example, supplemental lighting may be added or removed at will. Supplemental lighting may be provided to optimize the photon flux on plant targets during specific times of the growth cycle. Adding supplemental lighting, e.g., additional grow light fixtures, generally requires running a new separate power cable and is cumbersome and time-consuming and can add expense.
A wide variety of environmental and plant related sensors can be utilized to measure environmental and plant parameters. Measured data and sensor output may be utilized to adjust the environment variables including for example humidity and temperature. However, sensors generally require power and require communication capabilities. Installing new power outlets and communication lines for each sensor is costly and inconvenient. The used of supplemental lighting and sensors for environmental sensing and control can allow for customized grow operations and provide for enhanced plant yields, but the implementation, customization, and need to modify and change the location of these components over time in a grow facility can be time consuming and challenging.
Adding supplemental lighting and/or environmental sensors requires both a source of power for the lighting and sensors and communication channels for obtaining and processing sensor data and for lighting and environmental control. Having the ability to move lighting and sensors freely to adjust the layout of the grow operation as needed can provide enhanced customization and tailorability of a grow operation. However, adding a supplemental lighting at a particular place in the grow facility, for a particular time period, or adding a new sensor and/or feedback control system at a particular point in a grow facility requires the challenges of sourcing power and communication ports for the new lighting or sensors, and generally requires running new power and/or communication lines and setting up new support infrastructure, each of which can be costly, labor and time intensive, and which does not lend itself to easy modification.